Wednesday, 15 August 2012

ARIEL WINTER'S TWENTY-YEAR DEATH: THE SPECTATOR REVIEW

My review of Ariel Winter's impressive troika of a first novel appeared in August 4 edition of The Spectator. You can link to it at the Speccie's website here. What follows is the review as it appeared, except I have corrected one mistake, a 'who's' for 'whose', which was mine--I am inclined to blame predictive text, as I really do know the difference.Three Shades of Noir

In the days of cheap
paperbacks, publishers sometimes printed two pulp novels in one
volume, back to back. Ariel Winter has done them one better, because
The Twenty Year Death consists of three novels, dealing with murders
committed over the course of two decades, each told in the style of a
great crime writer.

The first is set in
1931 France, hommage to Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret. A
corpse found floating in the flooded drains of Verargent turns out to
come from the local prison, from which there is no escape. Inspector
Pelleter has just visited the prison, to interview a serial killer he
captured, and is drawn into the investigation. Among the anomalies he
discovers is the murdered man's daughter, the beautiful
Clothilde-ma-Fleur, still a teenager but living near the prison and
married to a successful American writer named Shem Rosenkrantz.

Maigret novels are
drenched in atmosphere; their physical setting reflects the
psychological background to the crimes, and Winter gets this
perfectly. Pelleter cuts through, almost forensically, the
many-layered barricades thrown up to outsiders by a provincial French
town, even as more murdered prisoners are discovered. And his
interviews with the serial torturer of children in the prison put the
puzzle of the his investigation into a very modern context, giving
Pelleter a perspective even Maigret might envy.

Ten years later,
The Falling Star is set in Hollywood, where detective Dennis Foster
is hired by an old friend working security at a film studio. Their
French leading lady, Chloe Rose, is convinced she is being stalked.
Chloe, of course, is Clothilde, moved with Shem to America and
become a star, but she seems to be cracking under the weight of her
success and Shem's relative lack of it. Shem is having an affair with
a would-be actress, and when she is found horribly murdered, Foster
begins to think he might have been set up to take the fall.

The hommage this time is to
Raymond Chandler, but Winter wisely avoids imitating the master's
style; it's been done too many times, and done well too few. But he
catches perfectly the essence of Chandler's underlying tone of
despair and disgust at the corruption Philip Marlowe finds under the
shiny surface of Los Angeles, where even the most savage crimes can
be buried if you've bought the right connections. Foster resembles
Chandler's earlier detectives, Carmody or Dalmas, the slightly more
pulpy prototypes for Marlowe, and like them he does as much of the
right thing as he can. The killings are stopped, reputations are
preserved, and Chloe Rose winds up protected in a sanitarium.

Which builds to the
climax, set in 1951 and written in the style of Jim Thompson, the
master of nihilistic pulpy noir. Rosenkrantz, by now a drunk and a
has-been, who'd be played by Sterling Hayden in the film version,
returns home for the funeral of his first wife, hoping to receive
something from her inheritance that will help him pay for Clothilde's
continued institutionalisation. His trip has been financed by his
girlfriend Vee, travelling with the gangster whose mistress she is on
the side, and Shem faces the prospect of a reunion with his estranged
son, born after he left his wife not knowing she was pregnant.

As you'd expect
from Thompson, Shem's hopes soon crumble, even as he begins working
with a local journalist on a play, The Furies, which might win his
reputation back. He commits an accidental murder, gets conned by
Vee, and even the master stroke he conceives to solve all his
mounting problems goes wrong. It's told in the delusional sort of
first-person inebriated that Thompson loved, and as he knew, there is
only one way these things can end.

That is the point,
and it's easy to lose it behind the audacity of Winter's stylistic
experimentation. These three books are indeed one novel, and the The
Twenty-Year Death is not a specific murder, but the slow death of an
artist, killed by love, by his inability to overcome his own
insecurities and live up to its promise. By borrowing the voices of
these three masters, Winter has also latched onto a basic truth they
all shared, the power of The Furies which defines noir: love is
deadly.

1 comment
:

Went out at once and bought this. Read it over the weekend. Verdict - hmmm... but well worth reading.

I think my problem was probably that I don't particularly enjoy Maigret (I know this is a Grave Error, but there you go). So the fact that the first book is a "pitch perfect" pastiche of Simenon it something of a problem. And [POSSIBLE SPOILER alert] the fact that the actual murders aren't really (IMHO) solved as such.

The second book - the Chandler homage - is excellent. Again, the murder mystery element is a bit of a throwaway, but who cares. Great stuff.

The Jim Thompson is as hyper-kinetic as the real thing, and hurtles past at such a pace that it's hard to know what to make of the actual story.

I think it's a great achievement - but the stories suffer. I think the focus has been on the style - and ultimately the individual stories aren't especially good as crime stories - and the overarching narrative arc is equally weak.

Fascinating experiment - and I'm very glad I read it - but not wholly successful, I think.